@danieldekay

Previously (Preventing memory loss for tango blogs) I shared how I wanted to get old tango blogs to be archived on archive.org so we don’t lose the stories and ideas from our collective memory. A reader commented that she also has one of the blogs on my list, and would like some individual posts be deleted.

How do you delete content (especially blogs) from the internet?

1. You need to know which articles you want to delete, and collect the URL to those articles. Beware that the URL might have changed over time, as some blogging platforms have rebranded.
2. Ideally, you still have the login data, and you can delete the entries yourself. If you don’t, you’ll need to contact the blogging platform provider.
3. Where could be cached copies or archives of these posts?
   • archive.org: they have a process to remove content, as described here.
     “While we collect publicly available Internet documents, sometimes authors and publishers express a desire for their documents not to be included in the Collections (by tagging a file for robot exclusion or by contacting us or the original crawler group). If the author or publisher of some part of the Archive does not want his or her work in our Collections, then we may remove that portion of the Collections without notice.”
   • search engines: check if you can find your content using the URL you collected in step 1. Use search operators like inurl:dekay.org, or site:dekay.org. If you can’t find anything, they probably don’t have anything anymore.
   • search engines I would check are: Google, Bing.
4. That should probably be it. Yes, there may be copies in someone’s personal RSS feed reader, depending on how they operate, but you’ll never find out.
5. Social media: usually in the case of blogs, they are shared via link, and never full-text shared. Removal should not be needed.